The present invention relates to IP telephony systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for maintaining call history for a user across multiple clients. Still more particularly, the present invention related to a system that provides other enhanced call history functions.
Systems that deliver voice communications over the Internet or other packet-switched networks have become common place and are generally referred to as IP telephony systems or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems. Such IP telephony systems are particularly advantageous because they reduce the communication and infrastructure costs by routing calls over existing data networks. Such VoIP systems have become even more prevalent because calls can be made using a variety of different types of endpoints. For example, such IP telephony systems provide voice communication and the user has the flexibility to use an IP phone, a soft-phone running on a computer, a thin client such as operating in a web browser, a personal call manager or thick client running on a computer.
Traditional and IP telephony system offer a variety of features such as call forwarding, conference calling, hold, mute, company directory, redial, missed calls, placed calls, voicemail as well as other enhanced features. Some of this functionality is dependent on the particular telephony system, while other functionality is dependent on the capabilities of the telephone or endpoint. One feature that is particularly important is the call history of the user. However, prior art systems only provided call history functionality on IP phones and traditional phones. The history systems of the prior art have been limited to call history and have not allowed management and presentation of other information. Furthermore, the prior art system stored the call history at the IP phones and traditional phones, and thus when a user uses a different endpoint such as a web client their prior call history is not available.